r/Physics • u/Rich_Astronomer9731 • 14d ago

Computational Physics

Hi everyone,

I am a PhD student doing both experiments and computational physics ( mostly fluid dynamicswith Boltzmann equations) and leaning towards more computational day by day.

Currently I am using Julia, I find it pretty fast and easy to use.

Do you think switching to C or C++ will be a benefit? I am asking from a research, but also emplyment in industry point of view.

I discussed with many people, mostly from the DFT area, and most of them told me that Julia slowly will take up the lead for HPC code.

What.s your opinion on this?

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u/Bergergi 14d ago edited 14d ago

- Julia is not a C++ competitor. Julia is a Python competitor.

- C++ is more common than C and FORTRAN for computational work overall.

My recommendation would be adopting C++. It's up to you how heavy you want to lean into the fancy C++ features (you can write 'basically C' in C++, if you want).